Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday November 18, 2008 @11:03AM
from the thomas-sowell-can-speak-to-that dept.

ruheling writes "From yesterday's New York Times: ' What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?' In many US universities, over the past decade, there has been deliberate effort to integrate and encourage women and girls to get more involved in the 'hard' sciences, engineering, and math. However, instead of the proportion of women to men increasing, in Computer Science the opposite is actually true. Specifically, in 2001-2, only 28 percent of all undergraduate degrees in computer science went to women. Now many computer science departments report that women now make up less than 10 percent of the newest undergraduates. What's going on here, folks?"

No doubt that the CS field is "socially challenged" at times. However, there are plenty of women in the military. These women face an almost institutionalized form of sexual harassment. This has not dimensioned the enrollment of females into the armed services.

I second your call for male nerds to dial down the stalker instinct. You aren't the first to complain of it.

While we're Blue Skying, I'd also like to call for wider adoption of deodorant in the CS field.

When did "American" become a lifestyle rather than a place of birth?When people decided that culture was a sacrosanct, frozen set of behavior rather than an adaptation to environmental forces. Of course the overwhelming nostalgia hasn't helped that problem either.

America, just like England or any country across the Atlantic, has subsets of culture.

The "fast food, celebrity [tabloid obsession], gas guzzling cars, and guns, [and god]" you speak of is the working class America. Especially southern and mid-western working class America. I believe in England this type of person would be called a scally or a chav.

The primarily middle class area in the west where I live is heavily populated by an entirely other subset of Americans that are educated, peace loving, atheist/agnostic, socialist minded, and environmentally conscious.

While we may not be wasting our congress persons time with debates on fox hunting, we are wasting their time with debates on flag burning.

The UK and America aren't all that different.

Scotland by the way is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. I look forward to returning someday. The food in Scotland has a lot in common with the American south (where the fattest Americans are) lard is not a seasoning, no matter how much the American South and Scotland may wish it so.

There is real sociological research that overwhelmingly shows that this happens universally within two generations. Even the most stalwartly entrepreneurial immigrants who reproduce end up with grandchildren who want it all, want it now, and don't believe that they should have to work for it.

Unfortunately, I don't see any rigorous research on the topic at hand. The anecdotal evidence of mostly male CS (and math) students has statistics to back it up, but no cause and effect beyond the shared belief that guys like Math and girls like English.

I'm personally way more language-oriented, but when it came time to choose what to study, computers seemed obvious. I had to enforce discipline to stay on the math, but programming and systems studies were just plain fun.

I was, and still am, just very curious about it. I like knowing exactly what computers are doing, and I often reconfirm my knowledge because it's still miraculous to me. I can see the parallels in other systems, e.g., biological, social, etc., but it's computing that motivates me to continue to learn.

I don't know any women who feel this way, although I do know of a few. I think it's the way we're wired, starting with the prenatal testosterone bath that males get in our twenty-sixth week of development and reinforced by social mores.

I think a big way of the whole "America,Fuck yeah" has to do with the way a LOT of the new immigrants are acting. I know I'll be modded to death here,but screw it,I'm calling it as I see it. You see,growing up I was surrounded by immigrants. Less than 50 miles from an Air Force base,and with plenty of migrant workers,we all grew up surrounded by folks from many other cultures and many different races,and that is how they were treated here,as just some more folks.

In fact we used to all laugh when the carny workers would look on in shock as the little Latino and black kids would buy up the rebel flag stuff right along with the white boys. My buddy Eric would laugh at them while he bought his annual rebel flag muscle shirt and say "Hell,we are all just good old hillbilly trash around here!" Needless to say it shocked those Yankees seeing a huge muscled up black teen hanging out with white and Latino boys and wearing a rebel muscle shirt. But that was just the way it was. it didn't matter your origin or skin color,you was just another kid on the block.

Lately,in the past 3 years or so,a new wave of immigrants have moved in. Primarily Mexican,they act NOTHING like any group that has come before. They make it quite clear they don't want nothing to do with YOU,that YOU are nothing like them. They don't want to be friends,don't want their kids anywhere near yours,don't want to learn the language and sure as hell don't want you speaking theirs. They stick to themselves in their own neighborhood,and with the exception of work,which they try to do with as little contact with anyone other than their own,they go out of their way to make sure you know they want NOTHING to do with you. Their attitude is so bad I keep epecting to see "Yankee go home!" painted on the walls. Only problem is I AM home.

It is these new immigrants,these "stay away from the dirty gringo" types,that are frankly stirring up a lot of nationalistic sentiment, at least around here. And I have talked to friends all over the south and west who speak of the same thing. They speak of how any attempts to be friendly and courteous are met with dirty looks and a "fuck you" attitude. And frankly this is not good. This is how hatred starts. And frankly I don't see how we can fix it,since it is THEIR attitude,and not those around them that is causing this contempt. So mod me down if you like,but I think this thing is going to get a WHOLE lot nastier as the economy goes in the crapper. Because nobody likes feeling like an unwanted visitor in their own town,and nobody likes having every attempt at friendship met with sneers and gringo remarks. And that is what I am seeing more and more every day.

Schools don't really teach science at all, they teach scientism. Ask your friends who did not get an undergraduate in math/science/engineering what their rationale is for believing in:

1) The atomic theory of matter (as opposed to the continuous theory, popular till 18th century)

2) That space time is curved or even what this means

3) of if they haven't done biology something like the germ theory of disease

The fact is people don't learn science at all, and the reason is because they don't learn how to argue through incorrect theories. I think it would be wonderful to teach the biblical theory: flat earth sitting on a firmament; with the sun planets and stars under a dome of water,.... and slowly work through why these ideas were rejected.

I think it would be wonderful to teach the biblical theory: flat earth sitting on a firmament; with the sun planets and stars under a dome of water,.... and slowly work through why these ideas were rejected.

I had a teacher who actually did precisely that over the course of a school year in junior high; used the changes in scientific understanding to illustrate the importance of challenging things and continually questioning accepted belief. Basically, the entire gist of his class was the importance of looking at the world around you and asking 'why' rather than blindly accepting what others tell you.

He got in some trouble for not sticking blindly to a textbook, unsurprisingly. But I like to think all of his students learned a lot more from him than we did from many of our other science teachers. Instead of learning rote scientific theory, we learned to question and investigate for ourselves.

What do you think "speaking in tongues means"? This is just a form of shared social experience your culture doesn't engage in. A religion which worships a cracker as the literal body of some 2000 year man/god can't really complain too much about nonsense syllables.

No - what earned liberals the label the "Blame America First Crowd" was them making an honest attempt at understanding why we were attacked on Sept 11, 2001 without excluding all possibility that it might have been in response to actions we had taken in the past.

Your pointless sarcasm aside GP as a point that a certain portion of the population has lost all perspective and worships the country like a god instead of being good citizens and stewards of the country and realizing that it can and does have laws that we should strive to correct to make it an even better country. They've lost the ability to realize that something can be both good and flawed.

There are two forms of love - that of a child to a parent, and that of two adults. With a child to a parent they cannot see the flaws and when the flaws in their parent are pointed out they become irrational and lash out. In adult love they see each others flaws and accept them and work to help the other solve their flaws.

That certain part of the population I talked about before loves America like a child loves a parent. Their lashing out is the source of the label "The Blame America First Crowd" because the other group, the mature one that recognizes and tries to correct flaws, was making an honest attempt at understanding what happened to try to prevent it from happening again.

I would also advise you take a look at your reaction and evaluate it in the light of this assessment.

The OP echoed my own thoughts (geeks scaring off the girls), but the "real" reason is because women are cool and computer science is not.;-) They simply aren't attracted to that type of work. And there's nothing wrong with that.

You ever wander past the Health & Human Development part of your college?

It's like an engineering class in reverse - 40 women; 2 guys. (I knew I picked the wrong major.) Men and women are not that same. Men migrate towards "things" and women migrate towards "humans", each dominating their respective engineering & health majors. They don't think the same and they have different interests. Why can't people just accept that?

What I don't understand is why these anti-sexist persons are sooooo concerned about lack of women in science. Why do I not hear anybody crying out, "There are only 2 men for every 40 women in the Health & Human Development Major!" I guess we men don't matter. How sexist.;-)

The outrage is that Health & Human Develoment majors typically don't receive comparable salaries to comp sci graduates, hence completely throwing balance of higher-paying jobs into the men's favor. To less-rational people, this can be twisted to illustrate that sexism is more rampant in the workplace than it really is. As ridiculous as it sounds, some feminists still tout these slanted statistics.

If comp sci and engineering majors typically made less than 30k out of college with no benefits, no one would give a shit about the lack of women in that field.

You don't get paid based on how much you or anyone else thinks you deserve. You get paid based on what salary you can command, which is regulated by supply and demand.

It's not an outrage at all that one kind of job doesn't get the same salary as another. If you want more money do something more valuable, which will be something there is a lower supply and/or a higher demand for.

You don't get paid based on how much you or anyone else thinks you deserve. You get paid based on what salary you can command, which is regulated by supply and demand.

I don't think that they were saying that it's an outrage that HR workers don't make as much money as other professions. The outrage comes from the overall male vs female income, which female-dominated relatively-low-income professions like HR skews, and thus gives an inaccurate picture.

However even if I misinterpret the sentence starting with the word "outrage", one thing I'm sure I comprehend, and that they're correct on: The reason nobody gives a rat's ass about gender equality in those jobs is because nobody is envious of those job's salaries. Nobody cares about the gender gap in day laborers even though it's huge. If CS was a low-paying job, nobody would care about the gender gap in CS.

I remember back when my son was about 5. He was watching TV one day when he got up and asked me, "Daddy why are there no commercials about boys"? I asked him what he ment and his reply was "There are lots of comercials about girls being whatever they want and being happy about how they look but none for boys.". After thinking about it for a while I realised that he was right.

I'm 27 years old (born in 1981). I have never known a time when it was okay to air a commercial where the woman was the incompetent party who was rescued by a man -- it's always the man who is the bumbling idiot.

This probably seems astonishing to people older than me who remember a time when it was the exact opposite. It's probably those people who are creating these commercials:)

And trying to force it is only going to hurt people.It's getting to the point that if girls are particularly capable of doing math/science they get pushed to even if they don't want to in the name of equality.

For gods sake let people choose for themselves even if they don't make the choices you think they should!

I'm not so sure that's a gender-based problem. I've seen more than my fair share of male students as well who clearly were not interested in actually being in computer engineering and suffered from the same problems. I'm not sure apathy is tied to gender in any discipline.

When we were in CS classes, we did not consider our male classmates to be scary, and some of them even seemed fairly cool. We'd flirt, and even exchange jokes with them that only a CS major could find to be funny. But we were all about making money. There may be men who are into computers just because it's fun, but women go to college to further their careers, and ever since outsourcing, CS doesn't seem to be the way to do that. If a CS degree becomes likely to result in a high-paying job, the women will come.

That's odd, I'd say about half the women that I know went to college looking to find a husband, not to make money.

As the adage goes they were looking to earn their 'Mrs.' degree.

There are still a lot of people out there who prefer, given the choice, the nuclear family model with 1 person, usually the male, working and the other , usually the female, staying home and taking care of children.

The social thing to do, if you want to stay with you peer group however is go to college now days. Often women are basically forced to go , because they are not yet married and your ability to feed yourself is in question without a degree of some kind nowadays.

I know women who have degrees in genetic engineering, education, nursing, music, all kinds of things, but the only real reason they went to school was that wanted to be around people their own age and hopefully find a mate. The career was a back up plan.

Which to me explains a lot. As CS and engineering programs have become more work , why do that if your hope , in the back of your mind you don't really ever have to use your degree.

Seems, like it should all be good so long as that is what people want to do, but I have met women who get really angry at other women for not having a profession ( as if staying at home and taking care of children isn't a profession worth having).

I've never really understood that myself. Given our choice, I would both hang out with my wife and our child 24 / 7. The only reason I spend 8-10 hours a day away from her and my child is that food and housing are also important to us. She feels the same way and doesn't want to work. So, I'm glad I earn enough money she doesn't have too.

If half of the population refuses to enter a field because of reasons other than competency, then the general quality of people in that field is going to go down. Half of the people who would have excelled and become great in that field won't because of social reasons.

In the CS world there aren't enough competent engineers. There are a lot of bad ones, but not a lot of good ones. My current company only hires people who are able to demonstrate competence in the field, and they hire 1 out of 5 candidates at most. They have billboards up all over the state and they're only able to get one candidate per week. There's a serious shortage of good engineers. I'd be surprised if there's the same level of shortage in Health and Human Development, especially at the pay grades that they're looking at for a good programmer.

So, while it's true that the "female agenda" or feminist ideology probably has something to do with it, there are very, very good reasons to be concerned if half of the population isn't entering the field for social reasons.

I disagree. I disagree with the notion that computer science is more important (higher pay) than the care of human beings, and I think people should be just as concerned to know why few men enter the HHD field.

As a woman who regularly reads science mags (and slashdot), I can tell you that when science talk makes me yawn, it's the guy, not the subject.
I was raised by a single father who was an engineer, so our dinner conversations were frequently tech-heavy and geek-intensive, giving me a much higher level of tolerance than most people, male or female. But when someone is griping, not speaking about their interests, I glaze over.

One reason people can't (or at least shouldn't) "just accept" that "they don't think the same and have different interests" is that it is for the most part demonstrably untrue. For evidence, please see Janet S. Hyde's meta-analyses of thousands of sex/gender difference studies. Sometimes you can find mean differences that meet statistical significance, but when you look at the effect sizes, it becomes clear that the differences are too small to have practical significance.

I read Hyde's article in Science and I was very disappointed. She made broad, sweeping claims of equal abilities, but in the article she admitted that she didn't have any data on high-level mathematical abilities.

Today, with the gender gap erased in taking advanced math courses, does the gender gap remain in complex problem-solving? To answer this question, we coded test items from all states where tests were available, using a four-level depth of knowledge framework (15). Level 1 (recall) includes recall of facts and performing simple algorithms. Level 2 (skill/concept) items require students to make decisions about how to approach a problem and typically ask students to estimate or compare information. Level 3 (strategic thinking) includes complex cognitive demands that require students to reason, plan, and use evidence. Level 4 (extended thinking) items require complex reasoning over an extended period of time and require students to connect ideas within or across content areas as they develop one among alternate approaches. We computed the percentage of items at levels 3 or 4 for each state for each grade, as an index of the extent to which the test tapped complex problem-solving. The results were disappointing. For most states and most grade levels, none of the items were at levels 3 or 4. Therefore, it was impossible to determine whether there was a gender difference in performance at levels 3 and 4.

I would like to see women engaged in every kind of work without discrimination, and I would like to believe that women are equally capable in CS, engineering and everything else. But the evidence I've seen goes against it.

What convinced me was a study of boys who had been operated on at birth for exstrophy. That's a birth defect in which the bladder is not contained within the abdomen but is exposed on the surface. It was difficult to repair it and preserve male genitals, so male infants used to be "converted" to female and raised as girls. This was the ultimate natural experiment. Even though their male origins was kept a secret from them, they overwhelmingly assumed male interests, attitudes and behavior. This proves with as much evidence as we're likely to get that there is a strong genetic component to many male preferences. Engineering and computer science may be one of those preferences.

NEJM, 22 Jan 2004, 350(4):333-41. Discordant Sexual Identity in Some Genetic Males With Cloacal Exstrophy Assigned to Female Sex at Birth, W.G. Reiner and J.P. Gearhart. 16 genetically male (XY) children had severe cloacal exstrophy including microphallus or phallic inadequacy (incidence 1/400,000). Following medical recommendation, 14 were surgically converted, including orchiectomy, and raised as female. "Parents were instructed to avoid revealing information on their child's sex to anyone at any time, especially to the subject, and were instructed that disclosure of such information might harm the subject's psychosexual development." Parents of 2 children refused surgery and raised children as male. All 16 were reassessed at ages 5-19. Subjects sorted themselves into 3 categories. (1) 5 were living as female (2) 3 had "unclear" sexual id

I would like to see women engaged in every kind of work without discrimination, and I would like to believe that women are equally capable in CS, engineering and everything else. But the evidence I've seen goes against it.

In many Asian societies, ones which could quite reasonably be considered more sexist than US and European society, there is a much higher proportion of women in computer science and related fields. Even some European countries have a considerably higher ratio than the Anglo-Saxon countries in my experience. Certainly the few women who I have encountered have been very capable, in contrast to many of the males working in software, and has led me to believe that there is a self-selection process going on, whereby only the top few percent of women are determined enough to make it through whatever it is that keeps women out of computer science in droves.

well... yes. Sexual harassment is a huge issue for female students/workers. One girl to a dozen guys, you're going to get hit on, a LOT. Even after I got married, I still got chatted up left and right (don't guys check for rings anymore?) and I really don't like it. It feels like the only reason half my co-workers talk to me is because I'm the only one with tits in the place... not because I'm smart, not because I can code with the best of them, not because I'm funny, or cheerful or anything else.

The "OMFG BOOBS! Let's go talk to them" effect creates a really hostile environment, which causes many of us to change majors/jobs... which makes women even more rare, which makes the next set of boobs even more rare... vicious cycle.

I'm fairly sure there was a dilbert comic on that a while back which I can't find...

As for your point: would that also be a reason why there are so few males going into nursing? Being uncertain whether someone wants to talk to you because they want to be friendly just because or whether it's partly because of your gender must be terrible.Try picking subjects which your male work colleges have no interest in and talk about them constantly to see how many get bored and stop trying to talk to you, anyone left either has very dull hobbies or is just interested in your tits.

A problem I've always had with this whole ordeal is that men are raised and taught to be... approaching? They are told that they have to be the one to start up a conversation. I think it's a double edged sword of sorts. You could have forward women, but they are quickly harassed as unsavory types. This leads to situations where a guy has to control that upbringing and suppress it during parts of his day.

I speak from experience when I say that if a guy doesn't approach women with intent of some type he will live a single life. Period. No questions asked. I stopped "trying" nearly 10 years ago and I have only once been approached by women... and she was drunk. I don't consider myself an unapproachable or ugly person, and I've been "hooked up" by friends that are surprised that I'm single. If we didn't have at least one side of the equation attempting connections, the human race would be wiped out in a matter of years.

Anyway, The ranting has a point. It's mainly that children are raised to fit certain roles in life. These roles cater to a work style and an interaction preferential in life. Men will always think about procreation because that's what they are told all their life. They are raised to be upfront and in your face (even if they aren't looking at your face.)

well... yes. Sexual harassment is a huge issue for female students/workers. One girl to a dozen guys, you're going to get hit on, a LOT. Even after I got married, I still got chatted up left and right (don't guys check for rings anymore?) and I really don't like it. It feels like the only reason half my co-workers talk to me is because I'm the only one with tits in the place... not because I'm smart, not because I can code with the best of them, not because I'm funny, or cheerful or anything else.

Now, I'm not saying all those guys weren't flirting, but were all of them? I've sat and chatted with just about everyone in any of my smaller classes. I know that I'm going to work with them at some point during the year, so why not get to know them. The sooner I can pick out who is going to flake out, and who's code is superior, the better I can plan for the final projects.

Really? This is about the ratio in my undergrad courses, but that doesn't mean you need to socialise with your peers. Most of the people I knew socially as an undergraduate were English students (now they seem to be linguists or physicists). It's not like you get much of a chance to hit on anyone in lectures, since you're meant to be paying attention to the lecturer, and once you're outside lectures the gender ratio is the same across campus, it isn't tied to your subject.

You know, not every time a guy talks to a girl is a come-on. Generally I would talk to people outside lectures who were standing by themselves looking bored, or who were part of a group already engaging in an interesting conversation. Whether they were male or female didn't really enter into it, but if you want to interpret this as hostility then there's a good chance you might be part of the problem.

For some reason its hard to accept that a lot of women simply aren't interested in studying CS, engineering, or hard science.

Its a similar problem to something like Nursing, in the other direction. At my graduation, the CS group sat right behind the nursing group. There's lots of comments at how the CS group was 80% male. There were no comments at how the nursing group was 97% female.

At some point, the reality has to set in that women on average simply aren't interested, and all the incentives in the world won't change that.

Women and men are different, feminism seems to think "Equal"="same". This is simply incorrect, the sexes are different and so are attracted to differing professions. Maybe men have a higher aptitude for the hard sciences because the simply find them more interesting and so pay more attention? Nursing requires an ability to deal with blood, urine, and shit of other people, I find women aree more able to deal with this kind of thing. Why is it important for more women to do "hard sceine/mathematics" jobs anyway? Let women do what they like/are good at, and men can do the same, k.

Yeah. Dot-com crash, combined with more general computer familiarity. CS is no longer seen as a lucrative degree, not even to the extent it was before the dot-com boom. And computers are now commonplace, so the field in general has lost some of its apparent exclusivity. Those attracted to CS for money or for exclusive knowledge are not entering the field anymore, leaving the hardcore geeks, who are alas mostly male.

Women and men are different, feminism seems to think "Equal"="same". This is simply incorrect, the sexes are different and so are attracted to differing professions.

Well said! While there is nothing preventing a woman from pursing a CS degree, why do so many people fail to see the obvious.. Women are generally not interested in CS and/or engineering. I have several female friends (non slashdot reading females) who have absolutely no interest in CS. When I talk to them about computers they look at me like I'm a freak. They are more interested in jobs that are more "social". This could be why men prefer action/horror movies, and women prefer drama/romance movies such as "Sex & the City".

Rather than forcing women into CS, I say let them choose what they want to do. Women tend to be more in touch with their emotions than men are, and hence tend to prefer jobs that allow emotional freedom and creativity. Many men would be find in a non-emotionally stimulating environment.

We raise girls to be nurturers and boys to be tinkerers. Small children are all given little dolls, which act as security blankets. But when little girls get their next toy, it's another doll. A little boy will get a toy truck, or car. The girl gets the Barbie dream house. The boy gets the lego set. We define gender roles for children from the time they are small, then are amazed when they don't break out of those roles.

If/when you have children, you will understand just how false this is. I can't tell you how many times I am personally shocked, and my friends who are also parents are also personally shocked, at just how innately different boys and girls are. And it's not just my own kids, but it's all kids.

Another thing I found shocking is just how unreceptive children are to parents' attempts to define roles for them. They really are there own people, and that goes from about age 0.5 onwards. Go ahead. Try to give your male child a doll. Last time I gave my son a doll, he was about 1 year old. He threw it around for a while, then smashed it repeatedly with a hammer. Try giving your little girl a toy gun. She'll put it to bed and tuck it in and give it a kiss good night.

In our house, my wife and I do not encourage traditional gender roles. But man, oh man, do they sure happen on their own.

You personally might not encourage traditional gender roles, but the culture around you, including friends, relatives and the media, probably does.

That might be true, but we noticed the differences since long before they were old enough to even have a gender identity. How could a child take clues from society about his or her gender roles before even knowing his or her own gender?

I don't think s/he is saying that the child recognizes pink as a girly color and hence deduces that they are a girl. The child simply develops an affinity for the color pink because it's what it is surrounded by most often and so when given a choice of colors it opts for pink.

A child developing an affinity for the color pink bears no relation to what I'm talking about, and that's why I called the example "silly". When I say boys and girls are different, it goes far beyond affinities for this or that color.

Boys seem to love action, motion, running, jumping, destruction, throwing, smashing, knocking-over, overturning, exploring. Even more striking than the actions themselves are the expressions of elation at just how much they are enjoying all of this activity. Girls seem to love speaking, singing, drawing, nurturing, cuddling, etc.

I can explain this over and over until I'm blue in the face, but it'll never get a full appreciation until it happens in your own household. Once you see firsthand the difference between how you thought you wanted to raise your kids, and who your kids became, then, and only then, will it sink in how bankrupt the side of "nurture" is in the nature vs. nurture question.

Ah the oft toted argument.Problem is that even with infants only a few weeks old, if you test their attention span for different stimula then you'll find that little girls tend to be more interested in faces and will pay attention to them longer and little boys will tend to be more interested in things and pay attention to them longer.

Children are not empty vessels, sure you can beat them into the shape with enough force applied but not everything is due to outside influence.

So that's obviously the case, but the point of studying the topic is: "why?". It's also important to determine if this is by their own choice or if women are subtly coerced into their disinterest.

I helped out with FIRST LEGO League at Georgia Tech a few years back. FIRST LEGO is a robotics competition for middle-school students using LEGO automation parts to perform various tasks. There were tons of girls participating at all levels, and it was pretty noticeable how different the demographics were between the middle school competitors and the typical college-age engineering students at Gatech. Thus, it's worth asking whether girls seem to lose interest in engineering as they get older, and if so, why?

If it's purely biological (the parts of the brain that determine interests are gender-specific), then so be it. If, however, it's due to upbringing and society's pressures, then it's a topic worth discussing. Indeed, it is probably desirable to change it. Why limit the pool of intellect in a field to men? You're potentially losing 50% of the problem solving skills, assuming men and women are equally capable.

What's particularly puzzling is that the explanations for under-representation of women that were assembled back in 1991 applied to all technical fields. Yet women have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical pursuit. When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor's degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys.

"Women aren't interested in X" has historically been applied to X = medicine, business, politics... and it's always been wrong. There's something specific about CS here, and I don't think it's the field.

To deal with the cold, hard logic of computers all day, you need to be comfortable with such an unemotional, machine-like environment. As an IT worker, I can tell you firsthand that many women aren't comfortable in situations like that. Far too many ex-girlfriends of mine have told me I'm "too much like a robot." To which I reply, "a sex robot?" And they say no.:-(

A few years ago, I was approached by someone canvassing for support as a candidate for the post of Women's Officer in my student union (there is no Men's Officer). She said 'Women make up 52% of the population, don't you think we should protect this minority?' Needless to say, she didn't get my vote.

Well, it could be in the increasing sexualization of female children and their clothes.

That's not oppression. And, frankly, women are behind that trend. It's not men dressing up their daughters like that. (That assumes it even is a trend; I'd like to see some hard data before I consider it anything but anecdotal.)

Or the way that females make less money in the same positions across the board.

That's not oppression. They have the exact same ability to negotiate for their salary as their male co-workers. Now it might be an interesting study to determine why women don't do this as often, or if they do why they are less successful at it, but that has nothing to do with oppression.

If you're saying that there's no law requiring companies to pay the same amount across-the-board for the same position, well, you're correct; but it doesn't have any gender component to it. I can guarantee I'm doing the same job as somebody making twice as much as me, and probably somebody making half as much as me.

How about the massive gap in numbers in government, as well as the huge gap between males and females in CEO positions?

What about it? It doesn't indicate oppression.

Just because we're not as bad as horrible countries doesn't mean we've fixed all the problems.

I agree that we still have a ton of problems. But we have fixed the problems related to oppressing women.

You should talk to a few RN's before you make the assertion that a nursing graduate has a more healthy lifestyle than a CS graduate. One of the nurses at the flu clinic recently had just come off of three straight "twelves." I was glad that it was the other lady who was giving me my shot . . .

Actually that does hit the news every so often, usually in relation to the daemonisation of men seeking to work with kids.

Males are in decline, leaving the traditional female sectors even more to women for fear of being branded "too interested" in working with children etc. Some folks are decrying it because kids won't have any male role models left. I think it's just what you get when society consumes itself with frivolous fears and scares itself with a new pretend evil each week.

Comes of people being comfortable and having nothing to really be afraid of, they have to invent or inflate stuff.

... where everyone jumps on me, the young white male programmer in a low level position. For everything I've done, for all the women I've sexually harassed out of computer science, for all the minorities I've laughed and jeered at through entire classes, for all the old men I've found in my field and killed A-Clockwork-Orange style, for all the alienating I've done by creating an "aura" or "mood" set against women.

Has anyone ever once argued that maybe--just maybe--I really really like computers?

What's the ratio in nursing? 20 females:1 male? So here's your solution: take all the entry level students from these two professions and even them out regardless of what the individual wants to do. See how happy you make everybody.

Or better yet, unfairly weight the minority sex in each of those classes, that's fair because I definitely was given a detailed account of the outside world while I was in my mother's womb and then filled out a scantron card for what I wanted to be--a white male in the United States with no heritage whatsoever.

The smart girls are going to med school or veterinary medicine. They see the creepy geek guys leering at them like they've never seen a live female before and figure if they're going to need to deal with some horse's butt, they might as well go to vet school.

> However, instead of the proportion of women to men increasing, in Computer Science the> opposite is actually true. Specifically, in 2001-2, only 28 percent of all undergraduate> degrees in computer science went to women. Now many computer science departments report> that women now make up less than 10 percent of the newest undergraduates. What's going> on here, folks?

Seriously, why does every career or activity have to have an exact 50-50 mix of males and females? Last time I checked, the hormonal balance in men and women were quite a bit different and each sex has a general preference to what interests them. The examples of teachers, nurses, and garbage collectors are excellent examples. The two sexes are different. Why do so many people have a hard time accepting that?

I've taken two classes at a major university so that I can get my degree finally. In the most recent class, the teacher has been downright sexist. Crude jokes that come out badly because of his broken-ass english and a horrible sense of what's proper and what's not. I've only gone to class 4 times this semester... the first two classes, and the two subsequent tests. During each of the first two classes I saw a woman get up and leave the classroom after a horribly sexist joke. It may be that I recognize this because I've been in the workforce for several years and have gone through "sexual harassment training" or whatever, but I doubt it. This guy is creepy, and he's outright lewd.

So yeah, I can imagine that women don't want any part of the field if the people training the next generation of workers are this bad.

I didn't get into computer science to be a SCIENTIST, I got into it so I could write applications and games and make useful things for people.

You don't need a computer science degree for that. You can buy all the books you want from Amazon, you can find the answers to all your questions online, and you can write any app you want in Python or Ruby or Objective C or the language of your choice. There's no need to deal with dry courses about operating systems and so on.

And if you really want some insight into NP completeness or whatever, there are plenty of free articles to read...or buy another book.

Women want to program and do useful things with computers, but maybe they're not as interested in what amounts to computer science for its own sake?

Perhaps we might recognize natural gender-based tendencies. Isn't it possible women just aren't that interested in programming? It's like asking "Why aren't more women interested in football?" They just aren't. It doesn't necessarily indicate some fundamental problem with the system.

I don't see a lot of people asking why there aren't more female plumbers.

No, but seriously, before my karma is ruined, it's all a matter of differing interests. When I got into computers, they were still a seriously nerdcore hobby. It was rare to even encounter another girl at school who had a computer at home, even less likely for her to know how to use it. My sister looked at my computering, laughed, and went back to her interests.

Kind of without me realizing it, computers became a bigger and bigger thing in the lives of non-geeks. The internet is what really did it. When my sister finally asked me to help her find a computer, this was a watershed moment. And the social aspects made possible by the internet was what really sucked her in. I enjoyed the bulletin boards in my pre-internet days but IRC and ICQ were the killer apps that really sucked her in, that and the web in general. And more and more of her friends ended up having computers, and the social elements online weren't about computers but were simply facilitated by computers. == This, I think, is key. She has become as big of a computer geek as me now but she's using it as a tool, not as an end unto itself. She uses Photoshop and Illustrator for her art, uses different programs as a designer at her job, does her personal writing on there, keeps up with friends, etc. But it's not just geeking out on computers for the sake of geeking out. She's not installing all sorts of upgrades for games, she sticks with consoles for that sort of thing.

Since Slashdot is all about car analogies, I'd say most women are using computers the way they use a car, as a tool that they find very useful but they don't care about what's going on under the hood. Getting into CS is like becoming a gearhead. Most car users, male or female, aren't really gearheads. And from the stats I'm hearing from people I know in academia, Americans as a whole, male and female, aren't really into the hard sciences. There's just no money there.

Come on people. Look at the stuff in here. I am an engineer who loves what she does (I build robots!) and I have the good fortune to work in Cambridge, Mass, where women engineers are often no big deal... and yet if I knew I was in a room with all of you, thinking that my brain is different and I'm just not meant for this stuff, and if I *am* good/interested in this it's just because I'm "weird" and going against my gender norms... well, I'd hightail it out of here, too.

And in other countries there are many female engineers. My mother worked with a Ukranian woman who thought it odd that engineering was considered a "male" profession here, rather than a female profession as it was back home. Most of the women I do see in engineering are of Asian descent. You don't think, just maybe, that we're doing a crappy job as a culture of encouraging American kids (not just girls, but even boys too) to get excited about and be interested in this stuff?

I don't deny that women think differently from men. But I do question the suggestion that this means women can't or won't do engineering or science. I question why engineering or science can't handle the way women think. It's not a matter of dumbing it down; it's a matter of figuring out how to leverage diverse ways of thinking about a problem. A group of people looking at a problem in different ways is more beneficial than one geek sitting in a cube doing what he thinks is best. A group of men is good. A group of men and women is better.

The lot of posts like "women are just different and don't like CS, accept it" are missing the point. Insight to the youngsters -- it didn't used to be this way. When I was in college about 20 years ago, there was a good supply of women in my math and CS courses. They weren't there for a lucrative career, they wren't chasing a dot-com industry that didn't exist yet. They were smart and geeky and interested in the world.

(And, in a good proportion of cases, damned hot. If you haven't had they joy of 1 or 2 totally cute, smart babes in all your math/CS courses then I do feel sorry for you.)

So something is changing in the culture or CS courses that's turned of women. In fact, it's happened with breathtaking, distressing speed. And it's not about the money, I don't think; the women scientists I knew were the *least* motivated by a big strike-it-rich payday.

I read a paper written about 10 years ago evangelizing teaching all object-oriented programming and asserting in passing that OOP will be more attractive to women for some stupid reason. Obviously that, at least, has not been the case.

Honestly, the geek stereotype does very, very little to attract women to CS. No one wants to constantly work with people they find loathsome, even if they might otherwise be interested in the field. There are surer ways to make yourself, miserable, but there aren't many, and women know this. They go into fields where they can apply their talents to people they actually enjoy being around. If that turns out to be impossible or impractical, then they apply their interests in a non-vocational way for example, perhaps by creating or contributing to OSS projects. The saddest cases give up entirely.

The male geek stereotype has been around for a long time, of course; why might it be to blame when it clearly was not in the past? Simple: the stereotype has changed. The "classic" stereotype, while it portrayed geeks as socially inept, also portrayed them as harmless: socially (and often physically) clumsy in an endearing sort of way, and certainly nothing to be afraid of. The more modern stereotype is far creepier, attributing more to problems with inhibition and self-control than mere misunderstanding. Geeks were once nothing to fear, and now they are, and so people have been away. Again, there are few ways to make yourself more miserable than to work with people you feel you constantly have to watch out for. And so they don't.

I believe there are two reasons. The first one (already discussed here) is interest. I did not study computer science to get a job -- I did it because I couldn't see myself NOT doing it. I know very few girls who get excited about mechanical things earlier in life (I spent elementary and middle school daydreaming about technology...female daydreams at that age seem to be different). I do not know how to change this.

The second one is more subtle: being really good at anything requires thousands of hours devoted to it with no apparent reward. If what you are devoted to is math or programming, it really helps to be unpopular for at least a period in your life, especially earlier. The same is not true if you are devoted to theater, chemistry, or biology, which you can practice in a more social environment. I think it is easier to be unpopular as teenage boy than it is as a teenage girl.

[this, of course, is a male point of view...I would love to hear the other side]

My wife and I have been married for 31 years. We met in college. She was a civil engineering major, I was a computer science major. She later changed her major to mechanical engineering when she learned that ME's are more widely employable than CEs. When we met she was a freshman and I was a senior.

I went on to get a masters degree, she took the classes for a master degree but spent the time she would have spent on a thesis getting ready for, and passing, the P.E. exam. She has had her stamp for a long time.

We are both now in out fifties. She gets calls several times a year offering her jobs. Some in the private sector, some in the public sector. People value her decades of experience. People look up to MEs with decades of experience and a professional certification.

I was laid off for the last time on my 49th birthday and have not been able to find a technical job since. It is hard to find a company that will believe that I actually have the experience I have. I can't tell you how many times I have had an interview where I have been challenged on my experience and even though I can prove every bit of it people just don't believe it. And, don't get me started on certification for computer people, compared to getting a PE certification in the computer world isn't even a bad joke. It is mostly just a con.

I went back to school and "retrained" as a teacher and I am now certified to teach CS in public schools and I work part time teaching people how to use a mouse. I haven't been able to find a full time teaching job because their aren't many of those and the competition for them is fierce. You see, I live in Austin, Texas and for about 10 years this is where IBM transfered entire divisions before they laid them off. There are literally thousands of people my age with my qualifications wandering around down here (we used to have a morning walking club just for laid of 50+ software developers) and they all did the work of getting certified to teach in the Texas public schools. I got the job I had when the lady who had it before me got a full time teaching job. My application had been on file for more than a year. I moved from a job that was even more part time to one that is almost half time. A major step up!

When my wife graduated from high school she took the ACT. She compared her ACT scores to the average ACT scores of different majors and the average starting salary in those majors. Engineering had the highest starting salary and most closely matched here ACT scores. I went into computer science after taking a class in it and falling in love with it.

I have come to learn that I am pretty typical of a guy who goes into computer science. Most of us do it because we really really like it. Some do it for the money but those guys don't stay in it for long. I have also come to learn that my wife is pretty typical of women who go into technical subjects. They do it because it is a good way to make a living and you can do some really interesting stuff too.

Now, lets see some of the differences between being a "software engineer" and a real engineer. My wife has been laid off once, I have been laid off twice. Until I turned 49 (I'm now 56) I made 20% to 40% more than she did. She now makes 250% more than I do. I have done thousands of hours of involuntary unpaid overtime. She has always either been paid for, or received comp time for, all the overtime she has ever done. And, while it is common for programmers to be told to get something done by Tuesday or else, that has never happened to her. Working conditions that are normal for programmers are practically unheard of for engineers.

Women tend to be more practical than men when it comes to picking a career. Being more practical they will google for information about salaries, work hours, working conditions and so on, *before* picking a major. If you want to have a job for the rest of your life, and work 40 hours per week most of the time, and be respected at work and in the community, you do not study computer science. At least

I've recently read a Groklaw article that mentioned a salary dispute between two lawyers. Both claimed to usually charge $400 per hour. AFAIK even highly sought after IT consultants rarely get away with that kind of fees.

It's like that in a lot of science grad programs. The percent of women majoring in it in undergrad is decent. Then you see the percent gradually (or sometimes sharply) drop off over Master's, PhD, and university faculty. I think that one of the biggest reasons is that grad schools, and academia in general, haven't yet caught up with the fact that they are now serving people who need maternity leave and who want to balance their work and family life (and yes, more men today want to do this, too, but at least they don't get demonized if they put their career first). Combine that with the two-body problem in academia, and you get a lot of women who just throw up their hands and say screw it. I know I'm constantly having to convince myself not to, and I don't even have kids yet. (I'm not in CS, I'm not even in hard science - but even as a woman in a very family-friendly social science PhD program there are enough issues. I can't imagine how much harder it would be if the majority of my classmates weren't women who have had or are having kids during the program.)